$250 is a very good price point for a light laptop for basic email/web surfing/document editing. It’s not a full feature laptop with a full OS, that is one reason the price point is the same as a 7″ Android tablet. It’s fairly full featured hardware wise. Web cam, USB ports, card reader and a 16GB Flash drive for storage. This $250 laptop is a good second system. I have a big desktop with a Drobo for storage, picture editing and other higher end functions. For the cost of the Nexus 7, you can get a real keyboard and better monitor. I’ve been using tablets, both iOS and Android for years, but I keep coming back to a device with a real keyboard for content creation.

For another $80, you can get a 3G version of this Chromebook, which is important if you are going to be using this device on the road. It really does require Internet access to be entirely useful.

Running quite nicely. I’ve got dual monitors set up, and it is handling just about anything I’ve tossed at it so far.

The thing has plenty of room for additional drives, but I decided to go with a Drobo for external storage.

The system has a 256 Gig SSD and a 1 TB Western Digital drive, but wanted something for storage that was going to give me some level of data redundancy. Having it not in the tower was a plus from the suspenders and belt viewpoint as well. The only downside was the Drobo’s USB was USB 2.0 and the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme Z-LGA 1155 Z68 motherboard is a USB 3.0 beast, with lots of USB 3.0 ports. It also has a few ESATA ports, but the only Firewire port was on the front, and not well placed for what I wanted.

Easy enough to fix. I’ve got open slots, so I added a Firewire card. That and an 800-800 Firewire cable and I’ve got much better transfer speeds from the Drobo.

w00t! This thing is big! It comes with three 230mm fans. One on front, one on the side and the last one on the top. If that isn’t enough airflow, you can replace the side fan with four 120mm fans, and the top one with three 120mm fans. I’m going to stick with the default fans for now.

Ya, I hear you. No video card. I’ll be cannibalizing the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 out of my old system, which will have to get by with the on board graphics again. That and a 2 Gig 7200 RPM hard drive.

That should be enough to get me rolling and installing software. I’ve also got a multi card reader on order, but I can always add that later on, especially since that seems to be the long pole in the shipping wait. The old system will eventually end up in the basement, hooked up to the TV for the display and a wireless keyboard/trackball. It’s got enough horse power to make a good music/movie server, and given the big screen on the TV, hopefully a decent device for stray web surfing.

It’s called the Mini 9. For $349 you get Ubuntu LINUX. For another $50, you can have XP. The base model has 512 Meg of RAM and a 4 Gig solid state flash “hard” drive. You can get more RAM and and a bigger flash drive, but the price goes up. The model with 1 Gig of RAM and 16 Gig flash drive will put you back $450, which puts close to standard laptop costs.